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    Selected Letters of Norman Mailer
    Selected Letters of Norman Mailer
    Selected Letters of Norman Mailer
    Audiobook29 hours

    Selected Letters of Norman Mailer

    Written by Norman Mailer

    Narrated by David de Vries

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    A genuine literary event—an illuminating collection of correspondence from one of the most acclaimed American writers of all time

    Over the course of a nearly sixty-year career, Norman Mailer wrote more than 30 novels, essay collections, and nonfiction books. Yet nowhere was he more prolific—or more exposed—than in his letters. All told, Mailer crafted more than 45,000 pieces of correspondence (approximately 20 million words), many of them deeply personal, keeping a copy of almost every one. Now the best of these are published—most for the first time—in one remarkable volume that spans seven decades and, it seems, several lifetimes. Together they form a stunning autobiographical portrait of one of the most original, provocative, and outspoken public intellectuals of the twentieth century.

    Compiled by Mailer’s authorized biographer, J. Michael Lennon, and organized by decade, Selected Letters of Norman Mailer features the most fascinating of Mailer’s missives from 1940 to 2007—letters to his family and friends, to fans and fellow writers (including Truman Capote, James Baldwin, and Philip Roth), to political figures from Henry Kissinger to Bill and Hillary Clinton, and to such cultural icons as John Lennon, Marlon Brando, and even Monica Lewinsky.

    Here is Mailer the precocious Harvard undergraduate, writing home to his parents for the first time and worrying that his acceptances by literary magazines were “all happening too easy.” Here, too, is Mailer the soldier, confronting the violence of war in the Pacific, which would become the subject of his masterly debut novel, The Naked and the Dead: “[I’m] amazed how casually it fits into...daily life, how very unhorrible it all is.” Mailer the international celebrity pledges to William Styron, “I’m going to write every day, and like Lot’s Wife I’m consigning myself to a pillar of salt if I dare to look back,” while the 1980s Mailer agonizes over the fallout from his ill-fated friendship with Jack Henry Abbott, the murderer who became his literary protégé. (“The continuation of our relationship was depressing for both of us,” he confesses to Joyce Carol Oates.) At last, he finds domestic—and erotic—bliss in the arms of his sixth wife, Norris Church (“We bounce into each other like sunlight”).

    Whether he is reflecting on the Kennedy assassination, assessing the merits of authors from Fitzgerald to Proust, or threatening to pummel William Styron, the brilliant, pugnacious Norman Mailer comes alive again in these letters. The myriad faces of this artist and activist, lover and fighter, public figure and private man, are laid bare in this collection as never before.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBrilliance Audio
    Release dateDec 20, 2016
    ISBN9781522637578
    Author

    Norman Mailer

    Norman Mailer (1923-2007) ha sido uno de los mayores escritores norteamericanos contemporáneos, así como una figura central en el panorama cultural: novelista, periodista, director de cine, activista político, aspirante a alcalde de Nueva York y enfant terrible todoterreno. Su primera novela, Los desnudos y los muertos, sobre la Segunda Guerra Mundial, que lo catapultó a la fama, ha sido publicada por Anagrama, donde también han aparecido Los ejércitos de la noche (Premio Pulitzer y National Book Award), La Canción del Verdugo (Premio Pulitzer), Oswald. Un misterio americano, Los tipos duros no bailan, El parque de los ciervos, El Evangelio según el Hijo, El fantasma de Harlot, ¿Por qué estamos en guerra?, América y El castillo en el bosque.

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    Reviews for Selected Letters of Norman Mailer

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    • 3/5
      Amazing collection of some remarkable letters from Mailer is well worth the time of interested parties. However, the choice to include all comments/context as endnotes makes for a very tedious read, especially when you consider this thing weighs about 10lbs : (
    • 4/5
      Selected Letters of Norman Mailer, Edited by J. Michael Lennon, was a fascinating study into the mind of one of our best-known and prolific writers. The letters were arranged by decade - - the 1940's to the 2000's - - which made the letters easier to read. Through the decades we see the many facets of Norman Mailer and his passion about many things: his family, his service in the Army, his many wives and children, his political views, his friends, and most of all, his writing. Through his letters we are given a peek into the thoughts and life of a complicated, talented man with a lively and honest gift of communication. In the end, the book reads like a biography told in a most personal way.
    • 4/5
      I have a love him/hate him thing with Norman Mailer. Twentysome years ago, when I was reading Harlot's Ghost and he was still writing feisty magazine articles, I was a fan girl. Then I slogged through The Naked and the Dead, which may be a very authentic WWII novel, but authentic WWII novels are not my favorite. That's not enough to turn me against the man, but it dimmed my enthusiasm enough to give an ear to the criticism about his misogyny and his ego. He was a busy, complicated, and long-lived man. He fought in WWII. He stabbed one of his 6 wives. He founded the Village Voice. He ran for mayor of New York City, advocating secession to form the 51st state. He wrote a lot of books, including one that he called non-fiction that won a Pulitzer for best novel.

      This enormous new book of letters doesn't resolve my conflicted views of Mailer, but it does validate them. J. Michael Lennon has compiled over 700 letters out of over 45,000 pieces of Mailer's correspondence. All this massive sampling can do is give hundreds of glimpses into the mind of a man who continues to fascinate.
    • 5/5
      I finished J. Michael Lennon's book a month ago and it's taken me all this time to write a review. All the while I've been staring at the 700+ pp volume containing 700+ letters of America's Great Existensialist, Narrative Journalist, Novelist, Pugilistic Feminist Misogynist, which represents about 2% of his total correspondence.

      What, then, can such a collection tell the reader about the man?

      Unfortunately for us, Mailer did not regard himself as a letter writer, and with rare exceptions, his letters contain no real insights into his literary life. Secondly, we are deprived of a study of his focused mind because he tried to answer all the mail he got from everybody and never regularly wrote a single person, thus there is no coherent literary dialogue available to us.

      What we do see exposed on the page is a restlessly ambitious writer possessed of considerable ego who could assume a number of personalities or moods. He's often tender and compassionate when writing to sick friends or remembering a dead one. He can be a bully to his sister, to publishers, to editors, and to fellow writers. He doesn't shy away from vulgarity, rather he embraces that aspect of life, generating and appreciating crude jokes and explicit sexual language.

      He mostly uses his letters to announce how busy, unconfident, and annoyed he is with the work of writing, whether it be journalistic essays for the periodical he established, The Village Voice, or his next novel. When not complaining about his business, he bemoans his lack of "experience," which he blames for his lack of novelistic productivity.

      That lack is a rare revelation. Mailer believed he required experience in order to write a book. His most famous novel, The Naked and the Dead that catapulted him into celebrity, is based on his WWII experiences as a gunner who saw combat in the Philippines; an earlier work is based on a week he spent working as an orderly in a New York mental hospital. When he couldn't seem to garner personal experience, he chose to write about the experiences of the most famous killers of his age: Gary Gilmore and Lee Harvey Oswald, achieving a Pulitzer for The Executioner's Song. Both his Pulitzer Prizes were awarded to his narrative nonfiction, something that must have rankled a man who was the self-proclaimed greatest American novelist of his generation.

      Lennon's selection covers Mailer's entire life. There is no doubt his life was the reflection of his highly complicated personality, always attuned to the present but pathologically unable to reflect on the past. Mailer could not live without women -- he was married five times. Nor could he live with them -- he stabbed one wife and was divorced four times. He could form deep and lasting friendships then savagely cut them off, only to seek to mend his fences later on.

      Few men ever longed so much to be loved and liked and at the same time wished to be envied and feared. It's easy to like the letter writer Norman Mailer, but I don't think I would feel the same way about the living man.
    • 4/5
      Norman Mailer was a bigger-than-life personality with a pugnacious, chip-on-the-shoulder ego, as well as all the narcissism that's often found in talented, self-driven artists, and much more. I'm sure being his friend must have been very trying, and for many, this book will be too. It's huge—there are 700 letters included, some of them several pages long—and it's all Mailer, front and center. The reason you'll want to read it is that it provides an unparalleled look into the mind of a truly gifted writer as he swims some of the most volatile currents of our country's history, from the Pacific theater of World War II, through the Beat years, the '60s, the Nixon era, and beyond. Love him or hate him, it's hard to believe how much he got down on paper. Highly recommended for lovers of 20th century American history, of mid-century American literature, and of course, of Norman Mailer.
    • 4/5
      I generally find a collection of personal letters from a different era completely fascinating, and I expected those from such a talented writer to be even more so. I really enjoyed the early letters, when Norman Mailer was a young man, but I found it more and more difficult to slog through as he got older and more pompous and rude.
      However, Michael Lennon did an outstanding job, culling down an overwhelming amount of material into a volume of manageable work.
    • 4/5
      The Selected Letters of Norman Mailer are a collection of nearly 700 letters written by Mailer from the early 1940's until his death in 2007. Mailer was copious producer of outgoing mail, writing nearly 45,000 letters during his life. The selections included in this volume are similar to his corpus of professional work in that they are wide-ranging in terms of recipients and subjects, and are at times witty, compelling, pithy, mundane, penetrating…you get the idea. Collectively they seem to have a little bit of everything.

      Mailer was a complex man with wide-ranging interests. His personal life was complicated and at times tumultuous, as were his relationships with other writers, publishers and critics. Being that they were his letters the only clues to the other side of the conversation was whatever he happened to mention. Even so, they provide a wide-open window into the kind of person he was and the way he looked at his life's work and the world it went out into. People who are already fans of his will enjoy these letters. I am largely unacquainted with his work, but found that reading the letters stimulating a desire to sample his other writing for myself.
    • 5/5
      What a fantastic chronicle of a persons life! It's like Norman decided in high school that he would create a unique type of autobiography and he maintained a thread throughout his entire life. I felt like I was reading a loose version of a history book. A glimpse into the 40's up to the current century. It was an intimate look into Norman's interests and biases. I especially liked the pet names he gave his wife in the 1940's. So happy to have read this book. A bit long and too specialized for a library(type of autobiography people may not recognize). Non-fiction is always hard to move off the shelf, but it is a great book for anyone who knows who Norman Mailer is.
    • 5/5
      Norman Mailer had a colossal ego. He also had more than his share of considerable talent. If most of his novels aside from The Naked and the Dead aren't great, it's to be remembered that his two Pulitzers were both for non-fiction work: The Armies of the Night and Executioner's Song (even if the latter won in the Fiction category). His work was always ambitious and always interesting, even when it fell short of his goal of being worthy of the Nobel Prize.

      The letters are a fascinating insight into Mailer's ego and it is to J. Michael Lennon's credit that he doesn't shy away from the ones that make him seem such a complete ass, like his letter to James Jones: "Considering your stingy, asshole-pinching nature, I could tell by the length of your last letter that deep in that crusty, fucking heart of yours you probably have the same kind of warmth for me that I have for you." (p 214). But these letters also show that Mailer, at the young age of 22 had great insight into writing: "And that curious insight you get from both Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, the way most of their characters turn to the bad after they have been most good, as if they could not sustain the ache of being always close and every-discrete from great goodness." (p 45). Sometimes a letter could combine both things - Mailer's appreciation for the great writing of others with his own stroking of the ego: "I saw Nelson Algren there, and if you haven't you ought to read his The Man with the Golden Arm which is the best novel written in America since The Naked and the Dead." (p 97)

      But most of all what these letters reveal that Mailer was a man of his time and alive in his time. We see his famous feud with Gore Vidal (including letters where he suggests that the feud has run its course and others where, in spite of the feud, he enlists Vidal for PEN work), we can see the formation of his famous works and the long correspondence with Jack Henry Abbott, the prisoner that Mailer championed and whose later actions were deeply painful to Mailer. But every now and then we even see a real charm and honesty come through, as when he answers a letter from actress Elsa Lanchester when she wrote asking for his memories about her husband Charles Laughton. That letter is one of the strong moments of this collection, a treasured memory of the time that Mailer spent with the great actor over the possibility of a film version of The Naked and the Dead.

      I had originally planned to end the review discussing the lack of context in the book because I missed the one line in the introduction that explained there were notes at the end and so I spent the book wondering where the context was, even when I knew what it was. Instead, this becomes a key book in the debate between footnotes and endnotes. I much prefer the former, not wanting to flip to the back to find out more information. In a history book, at least, endnotes are justifiable, in that they make the book more readable and are usually simply source information. But in a letters collection, it is ridiculous to have all the context at the back of the book and need to spend all your time flipping back and forth wondering what is going on. This is, I think, a large mistake on the part of Lennon as editor and it detracts from what is otherwise a strong letters collection, and likely one of the last. That final generation of writers who lived so long in the days before e-mail are now passed or passing and collections like this will soon be gone and we will have lost an important bit of the history of literature. I suppose we have Updike, and eventually Roth, at least, to look forward to. It's too bad that such a bad choice was made in the structure of this book. Still, though, it's an impressive collection.
    • 5/5
      There is something so irresistible about a collection of a writer's letters, especially one that spans so many years. All of the expected aspects of Mailer's personality come through: the ego, the profanity, the particular brand of masculinity, but above all someone absolutely devoted to the craft of writing. It is a lifelong obsession that is revealed in the sheer number of letters he wrote, who he wrote them to, and how the letters served his desire to be as much a part of the literary world as he could.

      It is far too easy to get caught up in the outward reputation of Norman Mailer, and all the political and social commentary that surrounds him, and I am glad to have this collection of letters to round out the picture of so talented a writer. His sense of humor, his ability to get straight to the point and his complete ability to just continue on being himself no matter what.
    • 5/5
      Given Norman Mailer's standing in American literature, I found it impossible not to be fascinated at the prospect of access to the intimate lens of Mailer through his letters. "Selected Letters of Norman Mailer" did not disappoint. Michael Lennon has done an exemplary job of collating his selection of Mailer's correspondence.
    • 4/5
      Letters can be so revealing, especially when the author is only writing for the intended audience of the recipient(s). There is a raw honesty about true character that comes through each missive. The Selected Letters of Norman Mailer is arranged in chronological order. Starting in 1940, Mailer is a student at Harvard writing to his parents, and like any typical kid he is constantly asking for money ("I have to pay for my meals not & I hate to starve myself" p 12). What comes through (besides his self described poverty) is how serious, even then, he was about his writing...even if he was a little pompous about how "easy" it was for him to get published. With his wife, once he is in the army in '45, Mailer is more intimate and revealing. He confides in her about World War II in a way he couldn't with anyone else. This book is definitely something for the diehard Mailer fan. It does help if you have familiar with Mailer's work, but you don't have to be to enjoy Selected Letters. Lennon arranges Mailer's missives to reveal a growing artist, youthfully cocky, intensely passionate and protective of his craft. Just read the letters in which Mailer defends the use of profanity and refuses to have it culled from The Naked and the Dead. From the 40s blossoms a writer sure of himself and the his place in the world.
    • 3/5
      SELECTED LETTERS OF NORMAN MAILER, edited by J. Michael Lennon.
      I struggled mightily to make myself finish reading this book, but alas, I failed. The problem? Norman Mailer. A short man with an enormous ego, the overriding theme in so many of these hundreds of letters seems to be his absolutely certainty that he is smarter than everyone else. Mailer is simply not a likeable person. Unable to take criticism of any kind, he often wrote insulting, bullying letters of retaliation to any and all who dared to write negative reviews of his work. There were also a number of letters which shamelessly offered and solicited blurbs to and from other writers and publishers. I should probably confess that I have only read one Mailer book, THE NAKED AND THE DEAD, but I remember almost nothing of it, and, to be brutally honest, I'm not even sure if I finished it. But I did think, considering all of the famous people, both literary and other (many of the biggest names are listed on the back cover), that Mailer corresponded with, from the 1950s into the 2000s, that I would enjoy this book. Well, I was wrong. I have never so NOT enjoyed a book in many years. (Lennon tells us in his introduction that Mailer wrote over 45,000 letters, and he has selected just over 700 of them for this volume.) In just over a week of intermittent reading, I managed to struggle reluctantly through 350 pages and nearly 300 letters before finally surrendering. That was enough. I simply did not like Norman Mailer enough to read further. To warn other readers: the addressees - all those famous names - are mostly irrelevant. These letters are ONLY about Norman Mailer, who comes across most of the time as a self-absorbed, pompous, know-it-all Jerk. (Yes, with a capital 'J.' I really wanted to use the P-word that also ends with a k, but thought better of it.)

      That said, I have to admire editor Lennon's work. In fact, I think I enjoyed his short introductory comments to the decades and his end notes more than I did Mailer's letters. They were well researched, succinct and informative. I have nothing but sympathy for a man who hung around long enough to become the confidante and chronicler of such a difficult, self-styled 'literary lion.' Lennon did a lot of homework and has produced an admirable book. Mailer? Sorry, but I could not make myself like the guy, and I now have zero interest in reading his work.

      But if you are a Mailer fan - and I know there are quite a few of you out there - then you'll probably enjoy this book. But as for me - call it personal bias, repugnance, call it whatever you want - I simply can't bring myself to recommend it.